Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory are the first team to sequence the entire genome of the Clostridium autoethanogenum bacterium, which is used to sustainably produce fuel and chemicals from a range of raw materials, including gases derived from biomass and industrial wastes.
The ORNL work was funded by LanzaTech, a biotechnology company based in Illinois with an innovative carbon recycling process. LanzaTech's gas fermentation platform uses proprietary microbes for efficiently converting carbon-rich waste gases and residues into useful fuels and chemicals.
Successfully sequencing Clostridium autoethanogenum -- classified as a complex, class III microbe because of its many repeating units of DNA bases -- has been of significant interest to the biotechnology industry. A Biotechnology for Biofuels paper co-authored by ORNL's Steve Brown and Miriam Land, University of Tennessee doctoral student Sagar Utturkar and collaborating LanzaTech researchers generated a top-5-percent rating from Altmetric, an online rating system that measures the volume and value of recognition an article receives from research communities and media outlets.
"With the complete genomic sequence, we will have a better understanding of the microbe's metabolism and mutations that will enable LanzaTech to make modifications to the wild-type, or naturally occurring, strain for optimizing the conversion of waste into fuel," Brown said. "Our ORNL lab has a lot of experience sequencing genomes, and we have the analytic capability to tackle this project."
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